The Mineral Ecologies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
This paper explores the environmental imaginaries of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, tracing the relationship between the poem’s representations of landscapes and mineral resources. While acknowledging the significant precedent of work on the poem’s hunting episodes, and its attitudes to Arthurian fauna, this talk is concerned first and foremost with the poem’s interests in soil and stone. It poses new theoretical questions concerning the relationship between fiction and mineral resources, six centuries before the age of ‘Petrofiction’.
It situates Sir Gawain and the Green Knight within the Galfridian tradition – derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain – and suggests that its distinctive pessimism, and (although rarely noted) its unexpected optimism, both owe a debt to Geoffrey’s variation on a familiar insular descriptio, engaged with the island’s subterranean riches. It traces the poem’s treatment of mineral resources as they appear, and recur, across its fictionalised landscapes, detailing the historiographical (Galfridian) codes that underlie this distinctive set of environmental conventions. It concludes with discussion of the contemporary places and spaces of the north-west Midlands that inform modern public and scholarly receptions of the poem and contemporary questions of environmental management, drawing on research undertaken at Alderley Edge for the AHRC-funded Invisible Worlds project.
This event is hybrid. Registration for in-person or online attendance available.
This page was last updated on 3 March 2025
